Vacation, All I Never Wanted
Desa Potato Head resort in Bali (image: courtesy of Potato Head).
I’ve never reviewed a holiday destination before and I don’t really know how you do it. The problem is, I don’t much like holidays. I think they’re decadent and demonstrative of a lack of work ethic. It’s very easy to go on holiday and have a nice time expanding your horizons, but what shows greater moral character is staying in your lane and ploughing the same furrow until you succumb to a stress-related illness.
Nevertheless, I accepted this assignment to review the Desa Potato Head resort in Seminyak, south Bali, so I’m duty bound to do my best. Anyway, I suppose I’m mostly here just to paint a bit of a picture of what holidaymakers can expect; a textual tease, as it were. Unfortunately, my notes from the trip largely read as things like “palm trees!”, “cocktails!”, “lovely bit o’coast!”, which aren’t hugely revelatory. But let’s be honest, Potato Head is a beach resort and beach resorts are all basically beach resorts. You can have a fruity booze; lounge around an infinity pool; threaten to swim in the sea while displaying no inclination to heave yourself from the recliner. Beach resort, innit.
That’s probably a bit unfair to Potato Head. As resorts go, it’s a cut above. Jakartabased architects Andramatin and Dutch practice OMA have designed the various buildings and they’re lovely. Andramatin’s beach club, for instance, is hidden behind a coliseum curve of salvaged Indonesian window frames, while its Katamama hotel is built from handmade Balinese red bricks that have blistered black in the sun. The most recent addition to the resort, OMA’s Studios hotel (2020), is raised on pilotis, from atop which the building snakes around a central courtyard along a series of walkways that have been cast from grey and blush pink concrete – the result of leftover Katamama bricks having been ground up and folded into the mixture. The Studios building, Potato Head’s head of architecture and development Ade Herkarisma tells me, is full of references to Balinese architecture. “Our role was to inject [the design] with the abundance of craft that we have in Indonesia,” he says, pointing towards the ventilating brick lattices that shield the hotel’s walkways from the sun. Each brick has been hand-made on the island and their perforation patterns are drawn from a Balinese lunar calendar, with the blocks variously cut into grids, circles, voids and crosses.
“We did a huge study on the way Indonesian architecture cools down buildings,” explains the hotel’s architect, OMA’s David Gianotten, who admits to sensitives surrounding a Dutch practice operating in Indonesia given the region’s history of colonial rule.[1] “Of course I have reservations about touching certain contexts,” he explains, “but the only way to do it is if clients allows me to construct something that isn’t me coming in, doing something, and then leaving again.” Hence the research project. “[We’ve used] vernacular and the sequencing of space to keep everything safe and climatised,” Gianotten concludes. “I want to actually build for Indonesians and for people who want to interact with Indonesia’s [architectural traditions].” Like I said, it’s all very lovely. I rarely felt clammy while pottering around, so two thumbs up because I’m a milky Englishman and Bali is very hot and close. The bedrooms are nice too, not least because Potato Head has brought in top-tier designers to do the furnishings. Furniture designer Max Lamb has made the chairs, lamps and a number of accessories, while clothing and furniture brand Toogood provided the rugs and textiles, as well as a natty robe you can pop down to the beach in. The whole resort is very tastefully done, extremely luxurious, and somehow smells heavily of jasmine, despite jasmine not being anywhere in sight.[2] So if that’s your thing, do go on holiday there. Whatever Potato Head’s jasmine technology is, it’s unbelievable.
That said, people should probably stop going on quite so many overseas holidays, so for God’s sake please don’t go. “Internationaltourist arrivals around the world have gone from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today,” wrote The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in 2019. “The root cause of this surge in tourism is macroeconomic. The middle class is global now, and tens of millions of people have acquired the means to travel over the past few decades.” Which is not in itself a bad thing, but alarming when you consider the attendant environmental and social effects. Everybody is aware of the airline industry’s impact on the climate, for example, but vacationing is frequently environmentally and culturally deleterious in other ways too. Thailand, for instance, closed its Maya Bay beach in 2018 for three years to try to allow the beach’s ecology to recover after visitor numbers reached 5,000 per day. Tourists, apparently, had become fixated on seeing where Leonardo DiCaprio filmed The Beach (2000), which is a form of environmental damage even DiCaprio’s Prius can’t compensate for. In Cambodia, meanwhile, wooden platforms have been installed at the historic Angkor Wat temples in an attempt to box off the structures to try and prevent damage from people climbing onto them in the hunt for selfies, while still providing optimal sightlines for photography. Who clambers around a near 1,000-year-old temple for the sake of Instagram? Idiot tourists, that’s who. Across the board, sites of cultural, spiritual or environmental significance are suffering rapid deterioration as a result of overtourism, which is one reason I don’t like it – I don’t want anyone blaming me for accidentally kicking a cornice off Angkor Wat while Blue Steeling for the camera. “If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon,” summarised Lowrey, “overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations.”
A good deal of that seems to resonate with Bali’s tourism industry. I wish I could tell you more about what an extraordinary place Bali is (which I have no doubt is true), but during my brief stay there I rarely left the resort. Which isn’t unusual, because that’s not what you do when holidaying at a resort – a fact that Potato Head is well aware of. “You’re missing a lot [if you don’t leave Seminyak],” explains the resort’s Pete Kean, who works on Potato Head’s cultural programming. “There is such a vast abundance of nature and magic [in Bali] that people can miss out on. It’s really important for people to actually get out there as well.” But you tend not to, because beach resorts aren’t typically about culture, or even respectful engagement with a surrounding area; they’re about on-tap luxury, and the idea that you deserve said luxury because everyone, apparently, deserves a holiday.[3] That’s certainly Bali’s pitch, to the degree that Sandiaga Uno, Indonesia’s tourism minister, acknowledged in June 2022 that the nation’s international appeal had historically been grounded in the “three S”: “sun, sea and sand”.[4] Tourism currently accounts for around 60 per cent of Bali’s economy, with 6.3 million international tourists visiting in 2019 when visitors were at their peak ahead of the pandemic. For context, the island’s permanent population is around 4.2 million people. “Bali as a whole is a mass tourism destination,” says Maitri Fischer, chief technical officer of Mantra, a Balinese environmental engineering consultancy. “There is nothing sustainable about mass tourism. It destroys the environment and local culture.” But still, we all deserve a holiday, so 🤷.
Recyling facilities at Desa Potato Head (image courtesy of All is Amazing, Paulius Staniunas).
To its credit, Potato Head knows these issues better than most, having conducted a series of environmental surveys around the impact of tourism on Bali in conjunction with Fischer and his team. Tourism in Bali currently generates around 1.5m tonnes of waste per year, which is roughly 15 per cent of the waste produced on the island as a whole. “But that’s the waste that comes from specific locations, so it doesn’t take into account how businesses and organisations work in relationship to the hospitality and tourism industry,” clarifies Simon Pestridge, Potato Head’s chief experience officer. “So I think the actual number will be way higher.” Regardless of the precise figure, the majority of the island’s inorganic waste is either burned, dumped within the environment, or sent to landfill. You don’t get much of a sense of this when you’re lounging by the pool, however, so I’m going to rely on Fischer to summarise the current state of Bali’s ecology on my behalf. “The main issues facing Bali,” he says, “are ground water shortage, water quality, waste pollution in the land, rivers and oceans, habitat and nature loss and hence biodiversity loss, urban heat island effect, and lastly, the effects of climate change. Climate change will cause extreme weather, more floods, more droughts. We will see coastal erosion with sea level rise and our coral reefs will die or be damaged. We will see crop yields be affected by extreme weather and if local farmers are marginalised, we could see social unrest.” If that sounds bleak, it becomes bleaker still when you consider the likelihood of the island mitigating those effects in an age of climate collapse and overtourism. “Having lived in Bali from the age of one,” Fischer concludes, “I have witnessed profound change to Bali’s environment and culture over my lifetime and I am pessimistic that we can address the issues on an island scale.” Close the resorts, if you ask me.
Except you can’t, because that would trash 60 per cent of Bali’s economy, which is more or less what happened during the pandemic. Indonesia shut its borders during spring 2020 as a means of containing the spread of the virus, and did not properly reopen to international tourists until October 2021. Across the whole of 2021, Bali received 43 overseas tourists. “Hotels laid off employees, which is very sad, because they didn’t really have any other option,” recounts Amanda Marcella Christanto, Potato Head’s director of sustainability. “The island was dead. I stayed here during the first four months of the pandemic and [the island] was like a zombie. Every time you went out from your home, it was like you were entering a cemetery.” Potato Head retained more employees than some resorts, but still dropped down from a staff of 1,200 to a skeleton crew that kept essential operations running and laid groundwork for the reopening. “We paid everybody a certain amount for the first year that we were down and then people started to move off and do other things,” Pestridge explains. “We knew we would need 500 staff when we opened [back up], so everyone was paid a nominal amount that kept their insurance and medical and everything in check.”[5] During a rare car trip I took on the island, a Melbourne-based journalist started joking around with our Balinese driver. “It must have been nice to not have all the Australian tourists,” he said. Our driver was adamant that this was not the case. “It was so hard,” he replied quietly. “There was nothing.”
So, that’s the dilemma facing Bali: tourism is destroying its ecology, but also propping up its economy. What’s a holiday destination to do? Which is the main reason I wanted to see Potato Head, in spite of my general suspicions of its industry: the resort believes it may have found the beginnings of a route through Bali’s tourism dilemma. Since 2017, Potato Head has been moving towards becoming a zero-waste resort, investing in recycling systems and design initiatives to help limit its impact on its surrounding environment. “We work in the hospitality industry, which is one of the biggest polluting industries in the world: [everything] from air travel to where you take up land from local communities,” Pestridge summarises. “But if we can’t change the whole hospitality industry, then we can change absolutely everything we do.” As such, the resort has banned visitors bringing in single-use plastic, created sorting systems to sift through and categorise its organic and inorganic waste, and developed design initiatives that can transform said waste into new products. Potato Head is full of sumptuous spaces, but it’s also home to a whole backend of rooms in which seafood shells are separated from the residue of meals served in its restaurants; where buckets of single-use, colour-coded plastic are stored ahead of being reformulated into panels of recycled plastic; where industrial shelving is stacked with old styrofoam packaging and tubs of used cooking oil; and where coconuts from the resort’s bars and kitchens are shredded into fibrous compost. “We’re now running [the route through these spaces] as a tour,” says Maria Garcia del Cerro, Potato Head’s communication director, “so people can follow the waste through the desa.”[6] She warns us about odours as she opens the door to the room in which organic waste is sifted. Ripe rot emanates, but I kind of like it: it doesn’t smell like a resort. It’s not very jasminey.
To date, Potato Head has proven incredibly successful in its waste initiatives, with Mantra having analysed waste streams through the hotel and subsequently set targets for their reduction. “We completed our first energy, water and waste audits by the end of 2017 and we set targets for 19 per cent energy savings, 45 per cent water savings and 80 per cent reduction of waste to landfill,” Fischer explains. “By 2018 we had achieved our water saving targets and have achieved about 50 per cent of our energy targets. By the end of the year, the responsible material management systems we implemented reduced waste to landfill down to 24 per cent from about 50 per cent in the beginning of the year.” As it stands today, less than 5 per cent of the desa’s waste goes to landfill, with the remainder processed in order to create new materials and products for use in either the resort or its offsite Sweet Potato Lab – a farmland R&D space founded during the pandemic where the team grow crops for the resort’s restaurants and test out new materials. “It’s only waste when you put it in landfill,” Garcia del Cerro summarises. “If you don’t put it in landfill, it’s a material.” The systems put in place to facilitate this idea aren’t necessarily complicated or technically sophisticated, they just require work. While I was at the resort, for instance, the hotel’s assistant sustainability manager, Dewa Legawa, let me mix up some old styrofoam, paint thinner, limestone, and oyster shell, which we then reformed to make the body of a soap dispenser for a hotel room. “We realised that we could make the amenities from this material,” Legawa told me. “We could turn waste into a product.” The whole thing took about 10 minutes, much of which I spent trying to flick styrofoamy oyster shrapnel off my hands like a toddler. So that should give you a sense of how straightforward many of Potato Head’s processes are – once groundwork has been laid.
“Separation at source is the key,” Christanto confirms. “If the waste is all mixed, we cannot reuse it, we cannot recycle it.” A lot of the waste, once sorted, can be processed onsite, with Potato Head having invested in machinery during the pandemic to recycle plastics, while other materials are sent to external facilities. “Metal is currently on our R&D lists because we don’t want to keep putting it in storage,” Herkarisma says. “Whenever we find a facility that can deal with that, we’re donating it.” The fact that waste management in Bali is not centralised, he adds, has helped the resort’s efforts. “Bali’s flow of waste management is quite complex,” he says. “In Singapore, it’s a top-down process, so people don’t really bother separating waste because they know it’ll be taken care of by the government. In Bali, because that process doesn’t exist, it’s a lot easier to convince people to recycle because there are so many initiatives that come from the ground up.” I ask the team what accounts for the 5 per cent of waste that is still entering landfill. “We have medical waste, which we can’t really do anything about because it’s dangerous to deal with in-house,” Christanto replies. Pestridge mentions cigarette butts too. “There’s a company making glasses out of them [overseas], but then we have to weigh up [the environmental cost of] cleaning and shipping,” he says. “Rather than just saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got rid of it, we’ve done it,’ we want to make sure it’s truly a sustainable venture and isn’t creating more impact without actually dealing with it.” All things considered, I think under 5 per cent is pretty good going, but Christanto is keen that I not brush over the statistic. During the pandemic, single-use plastic started to creep back into the desa as a result of hygiene measures, she says, while waste separation also began to fall apart. Waste to landfill rose to 40 per cent and Christanto’s team have only just managed to bring it back down. “We need to be honest, and failure is not something bad,” she says. “At the end of the day, people will ask the question. You might as well be frank rather than inventing answers.”
Underpinning most of Potato Head’s sustainability initiatives are interventions from designers. Since the resort’s establishment in 2010, its founder Ronald Akili (supported by Potato Head’s former creative director Daniel Mitchell) has invited a series of practitioners to develop products and amenities for the resort. All of these objects are made from the waste streams of the hotel and its surrounding area (Potato Head regularly buys in additional waste from around Bali) and designed to make use of the manufacturing techniques available on the island. “Basically, everything is handmade,” summarises Garcia del Cerro. “There are no machines here and people do things by hand that are just not possible in Europe anymore.” Certainly, en route to the resort from the island’s Ngurah Rai International Airport, you see a lot of stores selling craft goods, many of which unfortunately fall into the category of “island tat” – driftwood-heavy tourist tchotchkes that could be from anywhere, and which get no more culturally specific than being possessed of a faint air of the tropics (general). “There is all that stereotypical tropicana,” confirms designer Max Lamb, who has made multiple trips to Bali from his London studio, “but when you go behind the shopfronts, you see another side: the more traditional side of what their craft can achieve and offer. They’ve got an incredible artisanal ability, because as an island, they were self sufficient for such a long time. Even now, their government’s import strategy is incredibly strict and they charge super high import duties on anything coming from the outside, so there is a real motivation to continue to be self-sufficient.”
OMA’s Studios building (image courtesy of Kevin Mak).
As with the OMA-designed Studios, Potato Head’s ambition is to pair Bali’s craft tradition with alternative modes of design. “Bringing in international talents and encouraging them to work with local artisans and materials forces them to think and combine different approaches, which creates new and beautiful solutions,” summarises Akili. Lamb’s chairs, for instance, are superbly slabby, produced from sheets of reconstituted waste plastic whose smeared, spiralling colours bely their origins as waste. During a tour of the desa, Pete Kean pointed out one that’s a pointillist blur of reds, orange and white. “So this one, for example,” he said, “is probably orange juice bottles, Coke bottle lids, and oil canisters.” The plastic is beautiful – like swirling marble, but hyped up and giddy because it’s synthetic as hell – and all manufactured on-site by Potato Head (having previously been imported from Smile Plastics in Wales), before being sent to a Balinese woodworking shop for assembly into furniture. Lamb’s lamps, meanwhile, feature shades made using ijuk palm fibres, paired with bases formed from offcuts of the volcanic rock utilised in construction of the island’s Hindhu shrines – materials Lamb came across during research trips to the island. “I was initially a bit sheepish about being the foreign designer turning up and pretending that they know what they’re doing,” Lamb acknowledges, “but I felt like I was a good fit for the job, because so many of my projects are based on collaboration and travel.” Which is true. Lamb has carved a career out of treating design as something approaching a natural outflow from landscapes and the craft techniques they contain: some classically Lamb-ian projects, for instance, include pewter chairs that are sand-cast on Cornish beaches, and granite boulders cut into furniture in a stone yard in Hebei, China. His Balinese projects, he says, could not have been created from his London studio, but similarly grew out of their context. “They’re not my materials, they are their materials; they’re not my workshops, they are their workshops,” he says. “I have to go and listen, watch and learn, and then see how we can collaborate and work together to deliver something. It’s a question of what you’re asking a craftsperson to make. Does it fit their skill? Does it celebrate their ability and the potential of the material? Or does it try to lead them astray, which could potentially result in inferior quality?” It is a point echoed by Jan Rose, creative director of Toogood, who has developed the bulk of Potato Head’s textiles. “We talked a lot about the idea of designing for the island, and producing on the island,” he says. “It is all produced locally, so we’re really designing within the context of local manufacturers and within the materiality of Bali.”
I guess the pertinent thing to take away from all that is to recognise that this materiality is now a mixture of Bali’s indigenous materials and the waste generated across the island. It’s a mongrel materiality that has shifted over time to encompass both the natural and synthetic. Plastic bottles, empty oil cans and styrofoam represent as much a part of Bali’s palette as ijuk or rattan – a fact brought home when even a short walk down the beach from Potato Head shows you Tetra Paks washing onto the shore, like horseshoe crabs returning to lay their plastic-coated paper eggs. “We need to find a way to weave between these two polarities and live with the discomfort and the comfort,” summarises Seetal Solanki, the founder of the Ma-tt-er design consultancy who is now helping the resort map Bali’s materials. “There’s recycled plastic on one side, which is indicative of human behaviour and how damaging that has been to Bali; then bamboo, rattan and teak on the other, which are native to the island. There’s this juxtaposition or contradiction that exists, but they somehow need to create harmony.”
Part of that harmony is attempting to manage ratios: Potato Head, for instance, still generates more of certain types of waste than is required for the creation of objects and materials for the hotel. “A lot of things [in a hotel] are consumable – glasses break all the time,” says Lamb, who designed the resort’s glassware using empty beer bottles, “but the number of people drinking a beer every day exceeds the number of people needing a brand new drinking glass.” As such, Lamb is now consulting with Akili on the creation of a product range that could be retailed more widely. “The ambition is to achieve zero waste and ensure that nothing is leaving in the form of waste, but only leaving in the form of a converted product,” Lamb says. “So this ongoing design programme has a view to commercialise, which is a bit of a horrible word, or share the story through products.”
It is a bit of a horrible word, but then that’s the thing with Potato Head – it’s trying to improve an industry that is, if we’re honest, pretty horrible, but which is also unavoidable within Bali at present. “Bali will always be a tourism destination, and what we are trying to do is make sure that we move the industry towards a more sustainable future,” Akili summarises. “It is why we aim for regenerative hospitality. We want to encourage travellers to travel with the mindset of receiving and giving instead of just taking and consuming.”
Well, I hope that works, because the resort has made impressive strides in setting up systems to manage its own footprint, but it’s also aware of the limitations of its approach. The resort, as it stands, predominantly speaks to self-styled expats and international tourists, for example, while engagement with the local community remains lower than its staff would like. “Some of [the desa] is quite intimidating,” Christanto acknowledges, which is probably inevitable when you’re operating a luxury resort with massive OMA architecture. The desa has a cultural programme that welcomes both international and local dancers musicians and artists, but day-to-day engagement could be higher. “We’ve approached the head of the surrounding village, Petitenget, and asked him to invite all the families around the area to come and see what we’re doing, because of course there’s a barrier to entry,” Christanto says. “We need to approach them and not the other way around.” Christanto and her team are running free sustainability workshops to try and aid this outreach programme, with visiting designers also leading programmes while they’re onsite. “But we know that moving forward, we cannot only focus on ourselves,” Christanto adds. “We have guests coming here on long-haul flights, so we need to offset the carbon too. We’re having conversations with local initiatives about how we can work together. Maybe we could ask guests to donate an amount of money to offset their travel, which is something we’re thinking about moving forward.”
This notion of restitution and restoration is not a bad idea, and it’s one that’s partially encoded in the resort’s name. “You know what ‘Potato Head’ means, right?” OMA’s David Gianotten asks me when we speak over Zoom, inadvertently highlighting the fact that I didn’t bother asking anyone the entire time I was in Bali. I flail for a bit, so he puts me out of my misery. “It’s what the Indonesians called the Dutch colonists – white potato heads.”
Which I hope leaves you feeling well prepared for going on holiday to Potato Head. We can probably all agree that I’ve reviewed the heck out of it and, if you’re a beach resort person, you’ll have a ball. If you’re not a beach resort person, perhaps it will make you reflect on tourism’s impact on the places in which it holds sway. “Because this is really a discussion about privilege,” notes Solanki, who I’m roping in to write my conclusion for me. “So who is benefiting from tourism? Is everybody winning? Because if everybody’s winning, there’s no problem. But if everybody’s winning, then that means a little piece needs to go to the craftspeople; a little piece needs to go back to the island to regenerate it in some way; and a little piece needs to go to the people working in the hotels. It’s about care and respect and it’s also about setting up the infrastructure, because I really want this to work for the Balinese people. That, for me, is the big win.”
Happy holidays everyone!
1 The Netherlands only recognised Indonesian independence in 1949, following close to 350 years of Dutch colonial rule.
2 I fully expect to now learn that it’s actually everywhere, and I just don’t know what jasmine looks like.
3 Strongly disagree. Endless work and misery for me, thanks.
4 And given that Bali is an international party destination, I reckon you could probably add stiff drinks and sex to its portion of the appeal.
5 Tourism is a major employer in Bali and Potato Head currently operates with around 700 staff. It is not a closed ecosystem, however. “One of the biggest [recent] outflows of labour talent has been cruise ships – once they got back up to speed [after the pandemic], everyone looked to Balinese hospitality as the talent base,” says Pestridge. “You’re on the water for nine months a year, so the amount of money [staff] can send back to their families after two years is too good to pass up.”
6 “Desa” is an Indonesian term meaning village, with its use by Potato Head suggestive of how they would like people to perceive the resort as an interdependent community.
Words Oli Stratford
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.